DJ Shadow, a.k.a. Josh Davis, may have started out as a Bay Area
youngster messing around with turntables, but he's managed to make
a lot of music while altering the general concept of songcraft.
From his early singles to his 1996 debut LP, Endtroducing . .
., Shadow not only created multi-layered songs primarily using
samples, but his hip-hop-influenced work also resonated strongly
within the developing trip-hop community. Later challenging his
textured, largely instrumental style, Shadow paired with Mo' Wax
Records founder James Lavelle on the U.N.K.L.E. project, whose 1998
release Psyence Fiction included original vocals from
Radiohead's Thom Yorke, the Beastie Boys' Mike D. and the Verve's
Richard Ashcroft. Now the notoriously reclusive DJ Shadow is back
with The Private Press, his first proper solo album since
Entroducing . . . . It's a return to sample-based music,
but, not surprisingly, with an entirely different approach.

When I got my first turntable, which was in 1984, and I was just
imitating my heroes in the same way that anyone that picks up a
guitar imitates their heroes when they hear their records. For me,
I was just trying to scratch like Jam Master J or Dr. Dre or
Mixmaster Ice or any of the DJs that had solos.

What were your first experiments with turntables
like?

My first turntable was a Sears combination
turntable/dual-cassette/receiver [laughs]. I found that
when I was dubbing a tape and I had the selector knob between Phono
and Tape I was able to overdub scratches. It was just a glitch in
the way the system worked. So I learned very unconventionally and
that's why -- for DJs out there -- I learned what's called "hamster
style," and that means backwards. It was ten years before someone
said, "Hey, you do it backwards." And I was like, "Oh no! Does that
mean I'm going to have to re-learn?" Then I found out that Q-Bert
[of San Francisco turntablist crew Invisibl Skratch Piklz], one of
the world's best DJs, also learned the way I did, and I was like,
"Whew! If he can do it, then maybe it's not such a bad thing."

How did you move into the recording realm?

Around 1987, I started doing mixes at the local college station.
I got a four-track in 1989 or early '90 and put out my first record
in '91. It was a slow building process -- it was not spontaneous.
It was me trying to find a musical outlet of my own to express
myself and my love for this new emerging art form called
"hip-hop."

Recount the journey from those early recordings through
Entroducing . . . and The Private
Press?

Endtroducing . . . opened a lot of doors for me. I
wanted to try to and do music for a film, which I did for a
documentary called Dark Days. I wanted to get out there
and tour a lot, which I did with U.N.K.L.E. I knew it would be a
while before I was ready to do a solo album. In 1999, I must've
done 150 shows, and in November '99, I just kinda went, "Boy, I'm
through. I need to take a break." And that's what I did. Also, I
had to move house, I got engaged and just took care of a lot of
"life stuff" for the first time in ten years. After I took a few
months off, in the beginning of 2000, that's when I realized that I
was ready to start, but I still had a couple things to get out of
my system. I did this turntablist track for this Bay Area
turntablist compilation and performed at Skratchcon, the Woodstock
of turntablist culture. After that, nothing came close -- that was
the peak of turntablist culture -- and then I was ready to start on
a new record. I had to take that break to realize I was really
ready.

Did you go back into the studio with a specific goal in
mind?

For the listener, I wanted it to be challenging. I didn't want
to cater to my fans. I think, as a fan, when I fall in love with an
act, I really want them to keep just doing that again -- until I
hear them do the same thing again and then I realize that's the
last thing I want. You know you want a band to grow, progress and
expand, so that's what I felt like my goal was.

One track from the record, "Monosylabik," was leaked to
the Internet long before the record's release. How did you feel
about that?

I guess it's not as bad as bootlegs. I'd rather have people
download stuff rather than buying stuff that people are making
money off of. On one hand, it's nice that people are so interested
that it becomes like a "who's going to get it up there first" kinda
thing. On the other hand, as an artist, you want people to hear the
work that you do in a context that you present to people. [You
should] be hearing it for the first time while you're looking at
the artwork, and you want to hear it in the right sequence, so
that's the annoying part as an artist. You want people to hear it
the way you intended to it to be presented. A director intends his
movie to be shown in 70 mm, big screen, big sound; but if people
are watching it on a bootleg video tape, they are going to get a
very different impression of the film.

How difficult was it for you to clear the samples for
this record?

Clearing samples is always difficult and interesting and time
consuming and frustrating. It really shows you that the legal
profession is really just who talks the best talk and who fights
the best fight. It's just all semantics and who wants it more and
who is glib and who is the biggest BSer . . . It is quite
unsettling as an artist. The music that I make is a collage medium.
The music industry and the legal profession need to update the way
they think about samples. The way it's done now, lawyers still
pretend like it's some great infringement -- an affront to
everything musical, which we all know is not the case. Sampling has
been around long enough. There are many classic songs that everyone
loves that are made from samples. So to try to pretend that it's
some sort of "How dare they!" is just silly. They do that so they
can say, "If you're going to use a sample, we want seventy-five
percent of your song." Now if you've sampled fifty things to make
your composition, how is that justifiable and how are you supposed
to clear anything else? So it's silly. There are very easy formulas
that could be invented on a musicologist basis for clearing
samples, but nobody wants to do that.

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